I imagine sata thunderbolt bridge chips should make a big difference in latency for these drives. Right now latency is surprisingly high for the drives on thunderbolt,

I would love to see native TB drives. SATAIII seems like it was rushed to be ready for the SSD performance explosion and is practically reaching its limits even now. Why not jump on the TB bandwidth bandwagon instead of waiting for SATA IV, which doesn't look like it will be coming soon? Heck if Intel knew how to make a decent reliable SSD they might even decide to start making some crazy high performance SSD's to leverage TB which would be one helluva selling point.

I would love to see native TB drives. SATAIII seems like it was rushed to be ready for the SSD performance explosion and is practically reaching its limits even now.

After SATA3 they're mostly going PCIe. That should allow Thunderbolt enclosures, but it doesn't really make sense to specialize for Thunderbolt since the marginal cost is extremely high with far less headroom. There's already PCIe SSDs that exceed Thunderbolt's performance, they're just mostly server targeted at the moment.

Intel also doesn't appear to be allowing anyone else to make Thunderbolt silicon, so native Thunderbolt or an integrated bridge chip is probably not viable.

"The T-TAP’s only input is Thunderbolt, and it is self (bus) powered. Since the T-TAP is a Thunderbolt end-point (termination), the T-TAP should be connect after all of the daisy-chainable (loopable) devices, like your Thunderbolt storage.

Seriously, fuck Apple for its most blatant gouging to date. These cables may be proportionally priced to the higher cost of manufacturing, but that proportion (mark-up) has always been ridiculous even for what passes as a cheap retail cable. If the design is at fault for the cost, which can't be argued is prohibitive considering the existing and affordable standards do the job, then that's their fault too.

Avoiding TB like the plague. A couples cables equals the cost of a Firewire HD. A TB component equals a few FW components. I edit video, so I can always use more bandwidth, but I can never justify the supposed upgrade to a new standard (do some people just want smaller, more streamlined plugs?) over getting things I could really use.

edit: redirect troll to whoever is responsible for TB. Intel...Apple...I don't really know, but Apple is clearly essential to marketing and implementing it--plus overpriced cables and forcing new, expensive standards is kind of their MO.

You guys act like $50 cables didn't exist 15 years ago. No one is out to gouge you. Until you've chained together Ultra SCSI Wide daisychains and spent $80 a cable you don't know what expense is with regard to cables.

$50 is cheap for an Active Cable as witnessed by no one else being able to even match Apple's pricing.

Of course they did. They were still a ripoff. What are you asserting here? Both "because there is a history of it it's good" and "because technology was expensive it'll always be expensive" are god damn stupid.

Quote:

No one is out to gouge you.

Except the cable companies.

Quote:

Until you've chained together Ultra SCSI Wide daisychains and spent $80 a cable you don't know what expense is with regard to cables.

Hurr. "Expecting not to pay $53.13/GB from Apple for a high density memory upgrade rather then $11.25/GB or less from Crucial and other manufacturers? Until you've paid $4k for a couple of megs in 1988 you don't know what expense is with regard to memory." What a clever point you've put out there.

Quote:

$50 is cheap for an Active Cable

No, it isn't. It's more then the entire thunderbolt chipset cost. The active transceivers on each end are a few bucks worth of silicon, the rest of the cable is a few bucks worth of metal. No, Apple did not sink hundreds of millions into R&D to design that cable. $50 is absolutely very, very expensive. It's expensive on both a relative and an absolute scale. Do you buy all your cables from Monster too?

Quote:

as witnessed by no one else being able to even match Apple's pricing.

Or alternatively with no pricing pressure yet companies feel free to charge as much as possible.

Well opinion on pricing of cables is subjective and basically pricing is what the market will bear. If someone purchased expensive cables they either had negative experiences with cheaper cables or wanted piece of mind. People don't usually willfully pay more money when there are cheaper options.

xoa perhaps you're right. I used to be able to look at vendor cost or at least distributor cost (in a former job) and see crazy markups. It's hard to say if it's lack of competition driving TB cable pricing or Intel charging a buttload (sorry I seem fixated on butts today lol) for the chips.

I just look forward to the peripherals coming down in price. I'm willing to deal with expensive cables if the performance is there.

The cables can't simultaneously be so tough to make on a 'meeting spec' basis that no one but Apple can meet the onerous task (with suspicious that they might even be -loss-leaders-)... -and- a complete price ripoff of cheap-as-crap components marked up because exquisite Marketing has the customers bent over the table.

Are there any -licensing- issues with, say, Monoprice making cables? Or why aren't the peripheral vendors able to cajole a manufacturer into making them some to ship with their devices?

If there really was a ridiculous margin in the $50, what incentive would there be for other companies to charge more than Apple? Who is going to spend an extra $10 to not buy Apple?

You're right. It really cannot be the margin from the vendor side. These vendors would happily undercut the Apple cable by $5 to gain some sales. I'm betting that since Intel is a sole supplier of the chips the expense is there.

Well opinion on pricing of cables is subjective and basically pricing is what the market will bear.

Yes and no. Naturally in a free market value is to an extent whatever people are willing to pay, but there are further considerations then that, and that's the reason people are more irritated at Apple (just as with memory) then random cable companies. Even though it's a completely and total ripoff, utterly without value, I don't really blame Monster or similar for milking their platinum-iridium-nintendium cable schemes for whatever they can. There's plenty of competition, there's no particular long term issues, doesn't matter. Fools & their money are soon parted etc. For a lot of these companies all their margins are based around "selling the blade" so to speak.

Apple, however, does not need to do that, and furthermore they should have some longer term strategic considerations. It's reasonable to criticize them as being penny-wise, pound-foolish. Sure by gouging out the ass for RAM they raise their margins a bit amongst the ignorant, but it results in a user experience that is a bit poorer, customer relations that are a bit worse, and so forth. That sort of thing, while not necessarily clearly showing on the quarterly report bottom line, still can add up.

Or take the most direct, clear example of all: Firewire. What a clever idea it was to charge a few bucks of royalties for a while right? Huge money spinner that, must have brought them in maybe a few hundred grand! Big money! And the only cost was hampering adoption of the standard as a whole during a critical time period of its growth! Yeah. It was stupid, as Apple realized down the line, but the world does not stand still and it can be very hard or impossible to change momentum or first impressions. Apple has a significant stake in TB doing well. It could significantly enhance the utility of the majority of their product line. They should be aggressive in trying to make it as cheap as possible as quickly as possible, they have far, far more to gain in the long term. Hence, it's dumb and grating. This isn't some super budget brand.

Quote:

If someone purchased expensive cables they either had negative experiences with cheaper cables or wanted piece of mind.

Or more likely they've been taken in by marketing and convinced themselves that it actually matters. Audiophiles are particularly notorious for actively rejecting things like double-blind testing.

Quote:

People don't usually willfully pay more money when there are cheaper options.

Practically the entire "enthusiast" audio industry is a direct example to the contrary .

Quote:

I'm willing to deal with expensive cables if the performance is there.

But retardedly expensive cables dramatically limit the use cases, and in the technology world that's hugely important, because basically the entire industry is centered on network effects and economies of scale.

The cables can't simultaneously be so tough to make on a 'meeting spec' basis that no one but Apple can meet the onerous task [...] Or why aren't the peripheral vendors able to cajole a manufacturer into making them some to ship with their devices?

As somebody pointed out earlier on in the thread, third-party cables are now available, and they are actually more expensive than the ones Apple sell.

I'm betting that since Intel is a sole supplier of the chips the expense is there.

Certainly possible, although in that case we should rightly be blaming Intel (and Apple for not negotiating harder, they've definitely got leverage). Intel has a lot to gain from it becoming a widespread standard too, so if it's really all on them then they're also being disappointingly shortsighted .

Wishing for Thunderbolt performance at USB prices is tilting at windmills as long as both are for sale. Think like a business, not a consumer: Thunderbolt is a gift of high margin market differentiation to peripheral manufacturers everywhere. There's no reason for anyone to charge less for it even if they can.

The best use case for Thunderbolt is as an "ultrabook" dock. This is obvious! But so far we have only one on the market, and it's attached to a very expensive LCD. Something is wrong with this picture.

Yes and no. Naturally in a free market value is to an extent whatever people are willing to pay, but there are further considerations then that, and that's the reason people are more irritated at Apple (just as with memory) then random cable companies. Even though it's a completely and total ripoff, utterly without value, I don't really blame Monster or similar for milking their platinum-iridium-nintendium cable schemes for whatever they can. There's plenty of competition, there's no particular long term issues, doesn't matter.

quote]People don't usually willfully pay more money when there are cheaper options.

Practically the entire "enthusiast" audio industry is a direct example to the contrary .[/quote]I realize you put a smiley there, but that's not *quite* fair. There's the snake-oil, and there's a *lot* of stuff that isn't.

The best use case for Thunderbolt is as an "ultrabook" dock. This is obvious! But so far we have only one on the market, and it's attached to a very expensive LCD. Something is wrong with this picture.

I'll be seriously considering the TB upgrade once something like this hits the market.

Agreed. That's a comparable price to the dock I bought for my current (non-TB) MBP, but obviously that dock is specific to the configuration of ports on my specific model, meaning I might as well sell it when I sell the laptop. The one-port-to-many implementation here appeals enormously.

The best use case for Thunderbolt is as an "ultrabook" dock. This is obvious! But so far we have only one on the market, and it's attached to a very expensive LCD. Something is wrong with this picture.

I'll be seriously considering the TB upgrade once something like this hits the market. (And perhaps Apple might have a dock to go along with the new MBPs, especially if the no-ethernet rumor is true.)

It says September in the article. Which seems like a very long lead time to know when it will be available, but I don't know that something having an announced release date necessarily makes it vaporware, at least until it's been missed once.

Is the Drobo remotely fast enough to need it? I keep hearing from people that Drobo's slower than equivalent drives and then hear they are offering things like using high speed ethernet to get faster connection than FW-800.

Looks like I was wrong - the cables won't get cheaper - they'll get more expensive. At what point will the cable cost amount to "a big pile of nada"?

Probably won't be until there's more TB stuff out there in general cause right now there's not that much...I think it's essentially just Macs (with PCs trickling out), and a bunch of expensive hardware. I still don't expect much action until later this year.

But back to the cables themselves, I posted about Sumitomo's a little while back and just looked them up now to see where they're at. Apparently they started selling on Amazon Japan last month, multiple lengths even! .5m, 1m, 2m, 3m. They mentioned shipping samples of optical cables before (up to 20m) but I don't see any indication that these are that (at least in the english PR I could find).

For reference the Apple cable is 4800¥ while the Sumitomo one is 4500¥ (both 2m), down to 4000¥ for the .5m and 5000¥ for the 3m.

ClarkGoble wrote:

jahamasa wrote:

Drobo is hinting they will announce Thunderbolt something next week.

Is the Drobo remotely fast enough to need it? I keep hearing from people that Drobo's slower than equivalent drives and then hear they are offering things like using high speed ethernet to get faster connection than FW-800.

I'm kind of curious as to the issue there.

I was about to make a joke about that actually, I don't remember if they ever even got to saturating FW800. I vaguely remember one of their upgraded models advertising a faster CPU so I imagine the complexity of the FS is the issue, or particularly that they're pairing it with underpowered (for the task) hardware.

Obligatory told-you-so that the cable apparently actually costs ~$50 to make. The cable uses chips from Gennum; that may be the bottleneck.

I just don't understand the reasoning of Intel/Apple here. Either they are assuming the cable price is supposed to drop quickly, or Thunderbolt is only meant to be used in expensive non-consumer uses. Yes, the Thunderbolt cables need to be expensive because of their design, but usually companies avoid overly expensive design. How much additional performance are they getting out of this design that it makes such a huge roadblock sensible?

Are there cheaper ways to funnel 20 gigabits/sec? (or is it 30, with two channels + displayport?)

Yes. They could have put the electronics in the port instead of the cable. As I understand it, this was a tradeoff to allow for different types of cabling using the same port. Clever, but apparently expensive.

This sounds like the approach they took with SCSI. I do not believe that SCSI ever got to be dirt cheap (e.g. USB-2). Instead, SCSI was limited by the HBA installed in the particular motherboard. To go faster, you had to shove in a different card (assuming that the device had expansion card capability), plus get different cables (many of which cost more than the $50 TB cable does.

The entire LightPeak-to-Thunderbolt transition just screams "Dammit, we couldn't get optical to do the job for whatever reason." So the entire "How in the hell do we use our cool chip with copper?" plan is a Plan B.

And the "Cheaper RSN"... not happening RS.

If they've sold a million Thunderbolt cables yet I would be completely shocked. But the entire peripheral landscape has been pretty limited to high-end gear - the only really crucial thing that's been ramping up dramatically is the installed base.There's just not that much consumer gear to attach - and thus not a high volume of cables.

Which is what's needed for cable pricing to budge. So... it won't any time soon.

Sure it could be more complex than that, but why assume complexity when the real answer is likely something really simple?

If Thunderbolt cables and peripherals should be cheap, then the MacPro should be $1000. I think it's roughly analogous; Apple could make concessions to drive down the price of a tower Mac, but have no real reason to. People who need one will pay whatever it costs. Same with Thunderbolt.

If they've sold a million Thunderbolt cables yet I would be completely shocked. But the entire peripheral landscape has been pretty limited to high-end gear - the only really crucial thing that's been ramping up dramatically is the installed base.There's just not that much consumer gear to attach - and thus not a high volume of cables.